The five
weeks during the month of June will be dedicated to content from FranklinCovey’s
newest program, The 5 Choices of Extraordinary Productivity. Please enjoy today’s post, written by my
friend and colleague, Mark Murphy.
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Choice 1: Act
on the Important, Don’t React to the Urgent
How many of
you get e-mails in the middle of the night?
How many of
you sleep with your phone?
How many of
you feel buried by a mountain of gravel and keep thinking if you just work
harder or faster you can get it all done?
The Paradox:
It’s both easier and harder than ever to achieve extraordinary
productivity. In most organizations,
there are fewer people doing more things with fewer resources in exactly the
same amount of time. And technology,
with all its benefits, creates an expectation of immediacy to most everything.
An ongoing
survey of more than 350,000 people since 2005 shows that people, by their own
admission, spend about 70 percent of
their time on whatever is urgent and only about 30 percent on relevant and
important priorities. Think about
that! What if your cell phone only
worked three of every eight hours? What
if your car only worked a couple of random days a week? Also think of the possibilities if you could
do no more than just reverse those numbers?
Productivity
is not just about “getting it all done”.
It’s about getting the right things done. It’s the product of our decisions, where we
focus our attention, and our energy levels.
The Promise:
There are 5 Choices that, when consistently made, ensure that you will
achieve extraordinary productivity in your work and life.
Choice 1: Act on the Important, Don’t React to the
Urgent
Dr. Edward M. Hallowell, MD of the Hallowell Center
for Cognitive and Emotional Health says that
“the key symptoms of ADD; distractibility,
impulsivity, restlessness, disorganization, trouble planning, procrastination,
have come to be key attributes of most people working and living in today’s
world”. “The symptoms of overloaded
circuits are very similar to the symptoms of Attention Deficit Disorder”.
The
prefrontal cortex part of the brain is the action center of the brain. It’s where we do higher-level tasks like
planning and making careful choices. And
it’s overwhelmed.
Meanwhile,
the reactive, primitive/emotional part of the brain has more and more stimuli
to react to, given the constant flood of interruptions we live with.
It’s
interesting to consider that we are physiologically programmed to respond to
urgencies. That response mechanism has
been passed down to us from our ancestors whose response to urgency was often
truly a life-or-death decision. When faced
with a threat, our ancestors got a shot of adrenaline that raised the heart
rate, widened the blood vessels, and sped up breathing. It made them quick, strong reactors.
But what was
once a rare occurrence now happens all the time. We confront urgent demands all day long. And that same circuitry that can make us
reactive can also make us addicted.
An excellent
model to illustrate this is the Time Matrix.
We often
spend our time in the urgencies of Quadrants 1 and 3 all day long. We become so exhausted that our natural
tendency at the end of the day is to go straight to Quadrant 4. And the next day we start the whole process
over again. We, in essence, create a
Bermuda Triangle for ourselves that literally sucks us in. And the only Quadrant being neglected ends up
being Quadrant 2 which is where real productivity most often occurs.
There are
very good reasons for this. In many
organizations Quadrants 1 and 3 are high visibility and are often the most
recognized and rewarded activities.
Quadrant 2 activities are often “under the radar” and less noticed at
the time.
Also, if
urgent things are neglected there is a very quick negative impact to not doing
them. So we often focus on them to the
exclusion of Quadrant 2 (important) items, which if neglected, often have a
deferred, but much larger negative impact.
In short, we become addicted to the urgent.
It becomes
critical to create a Quadrant 2 culture, which may not be as hard as we might
expect. It often begins with the courage
to start some conversations around topics like:
- Identifying the top two or three Q2 activities
that could make a significant impact on the team or organizational goals.
- Determining the value of those Q2 activities
(impact on the bottom line, customer loyalty, problem prevention, key
relationships, etc.)
- Identifying two or three Q3 activities that
hinder these Q2 activities and discuss how to eliminate them.
Based on the Time Matrix we can
create a culture that is focused on the important and not just the urgent. It allows us the ability to have
conversations within our circle of influence that are focused on Q2 and reduce
the time spent in Q3. “The very best
leaders are focused on the language of importance instead of the language of
urgency”. We can ask questions like, why
should this be done now? Or how does
this help us achieve our goals? If
everyone understands the Time Matrix we can create a shorthand language with
questions like, is that really a Q2? Or, are you sure that’s a Q1 because it
feels an awful lot like a Q3? In
short…so we can create a Q2 culture that allows us to spend time on what is
most important and will generate the best results.
Without a shared language of
importance it is really easy to get distracted from the things that really
impact the results.
-
Mark Murphy, FranklinCovey Consultant
Copyright © 2012 - Mark Murphy
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Join us next week as we continue
to dive into The 5 Choices content, with Choice 2: Go for Extraordinary, Don’t Settle for Ordinary.
Enabling Greatness, One
Organization at Time,
John Vakidis
